Your Book Is So Much More Than A Book

Happy to share with you a wonderful post from Jacqui Malpass, a writer, author and book coach. This post first appeared on Write Tribe.

Your Book Is So Much More Than A Book

Many of my best business decisions have come when I have put pen to paper and just let my subconscious roam free. I adore writing, from the every day to-do list, journaling your deepest thoughts to writing your own book.

William Faulkner says “I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.”

Let’s start with you

Writing is healing, the act of writing releases tension and allows your subconscious thoughts to flow and, upon reflection, you will begin to see sense, patterns, ways through your problems and onto to solutions, ideas and inspiration.
Writing gives birth to ideas, innovations, opens new decision pathways, creates new connections to ourselves and others, it allows us to tell our stories and we have an opportunity to help others with our inspirational message.

Writing takes you on an adventure, you start your journey quite unaware of the change that you will go through as you learn new skills, experience new ways of expressing yourself, gain clarity and grow as a person.

What about your business?

Imagine that you are trying to connect and communicate your ideas and brand to a prospect. You see and hear yourself telling the tale of the someone else who had a problem, which you solved and everyone lived happily ever after. In those few vital minutes you have to demonstrate innovation, flexibility, customer service levels, credibility, expertise, experience, know how and whatever it is that the prospect or needs to hear that reassures them that you are the right person to do business with.

Enter your book. Imagine instead that this prospect had visited your website to pre-qualify you and discovered your book. That alone speaks volumes about you and your brand. With any luck they will be suitable impressed enough to pick up the phone.

A book gives you instant credibility. A beautifully crafted book will help you to stand out, captivate your readers, put you miles ahead of your competitors, open up new opportunities for alliances, speaking gigs and the creation of new products and services. You can use your book as the basis of your coaching, training and online programmes. It is a lead generator and an extremely useful tool to be used in many business scenarios.

What about your business strategy?

Let’s take a reality check, before you rush off to pen your bestselling brand building, life changing book. Writing a book, should be part of your overall business strategy, it is not the strategy. When working with my clients the conversation is about the vision for their business and then considering how writing their book will help to bring that alive. We look at where you want to be one year from now and make sure that the right book, that supports that vision is written.

Given the changing landscape of publishing, it will be a rare author who makes a living from books alone. However, if one of your business objectives is to become an after dinner speaker, your book could lead the way to your first engagement. That speaking opportunity will recoup the cost of writing your book. Even if you are not paid to speak, you can sell your book at your events and take bookings for additional work.

Exercise: Your book idea

Take a sheet of A4 paper, fold it in half, and create ‘your book.’ Write up everything, except the blurb before you go to bed. Pop it under your pillow and in the morning write up the blurb. When it is completed, pop it into your book bible.

Front
Your book title – write the first thing that comes into your head

Inside side 1
WHAT: what is your book about?

Inside side 2
WHY: why are you writing it?

Back
THE BLURB: This stuff is on the back, it is your sales copy. Tell us about your book.
This activity pulls together all of your thinking about your book in one place, and provides a starting point to gaining absolute clarity.

Your book writing questions

What is your vision for you, your book and your business?

Imagine that you are one year on from writing your book, look back, what have your learnt, where are you and your business?

Jacqui

Jacqui Malpass is a writer, author and book coach who works with clients to discover what they want to write about, helps them to plan, write, edit and self publish their own non fiction books, either for business or for memoir.

Jacqui is also a highly regarded personal branding expert. She’ll help you discover who you really are and how to turn what you know into something that is bigger than your book.

Jacqui runs a number of different events each year. She has a 10 week programme that will help you to write your book in 10 weeks. In April there is a writing retreat in Spain. Later in the year she is running a walking and writing retreat and a yoga and writing retreat also in Spain. In addition she runs the Academy for Authors which is a live training programme backed by videos and worksheets.

All of her workshops and retreats are designed to make writing a book easy and stress free. They are about building the right structure for you to write your book and enabling you to find the best way for you. The book you walk away with will be the right book for you and your brand.

You can connect with Jacqui on her website, on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.